Local Elections make Labour elite choke on their quinoa

Why has the Labour vote evaporated? Maybe it’s because Labour stopped representing the people it was created to represent. It is a party not fit for purpose.

Aditya Chakrabortty looks at Labour’s Welsh problem in the Guardian. In the recent local council elections Labour lost its Welsh heartland council of Blaenau Gwent to independents.

For decades, Labour took this area and its other heartlands for granted – while it flirted with Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman. It parachuted in its plastic professional politicians – just think of the way Tristram Hunt was airlifted into Stoke – and ignored the need to nurture local talent. Now in Wales and elsewhere, it is paying the price of decades of ingrained arrogance.

Brexit has brought to a head the divorce between Labour and millions of working-class voters. Some 90-odd per cent of Labour MPs backed the establishment’s Remain campaign – including Corbyn, the ‘man of principle’ who shelved his longstanding Bennite principle of opposing the EU for the duration of the referendum campaign. More than 70 per cent of Labour MPs, however, represented seats where the majority of voters backed Leave.

As the newly elected Tory mayor of Tees Valley said after his victory in that supposed Labour stronghold last week, locals had ‘voted strongly for Leave but our local Labour opponents were all for Remain, making them completely unconnected’.

If you want to find individuals who epitomise Labour’s aloofness from the proles, their detachment and otherworldliness from people who don’t know how to pronounce quinoa (tip, it’s pronounced “Eugh!”) you could cop a load of pretty much any of Jeremy Cobyn’s shadow Cabinet but my pick has to be knowing anti-sexist Emily Thornberry.

When not mocking the working classes, the Islington MP is patronising. Speaking on Peston on Sunday Thornberry revealed her low opinion voters: “There is no alternative vision that the Tories are offering. It is not good enough for people to simply say ‘I like Theresa May’s hair’ or ‘I like that shade of blue’. Politics is not about that, politics is about how you change people’s lives.”

Next week, Emily will use her Missionary Masterclass to tell voters how to hold a pencil and that tobacco, although a leaf, is not one of their five a day.